Guess money does not matter anymore when you are truly exhausted and bored with your job.
To be able to earn $450,000 USD (approximately RM1.9 million) per year may sound like a dream to many, but there is someone who quit this dream job because of boredom. Writing for an article at Business Insider, Michael Lin shares how he quits his job as a senior software engineer at Netflix due to the monotonous work and loss of motivation.
After leaving Amazon, Lin landed a role as a senior software engineer at Netflix in 2017. “I made $450,000 a year, got free food daily, and had unlimited paid time off. It was the Big Tech dream,” he stated. He said that the first two years of working at Netflix were amazing and that he learned a lot, until he started to feel like the work got repetitive.
“Then COVID-19 happened. The office shut down, and all my favourite parts of work — the socializing, the coworkers, the perks — disappeared,” he shared, adding that he wanted to make a bigger change by transitioning to the project manager role.
However, his network building and applying for product manager jobs within Netflix did not succeed because the company did not have a horizontal job position switch available.
Unable to switch to the desired role, Lin said the high salary felt more like a bad deal. “When I started at Netflix, I was making money and continuously learning new things. Now, I was just making money, with no career progression,” he said, adding that both his motivation and performance declined.
“It’s hard to give up a salary — something tangible — for intangible things like your youth and your time. But I couldn’t shake the knowledge that many people had lost their lives during the pandemic,” he shared that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed his perspective on work. He did not want to live all his life doing a job that he no longer likes.
After the discussion with his manager and the human resource team, Netflix agreed to preemptively terminate him, and he received his preemptive severance package. After leaving the company, he started to meet more people like writers, entrepreneurs and creators via his own business. He also mentioned that he will dedicate himself fully to his own business.
“Although I’m just starting and don’t have any dependable streams of income yet, I’m going to trust the process that if I do work that energizes me, good things will happen,” he said.
Sometimes, quitting a job is indeed the best decision if you feel like you are no longer passionate, and that your job performance has plummeted along with your loss of motivation. It is better to look for other job options rather than staying in the same job doing the bare minimum. If you are facing a dilemma, take some time off and think about your career goals and don’t be afraid of changes.
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